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Hello, thank you for joining me for this post-lunch slot. I hope you enjoyed it.
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So I'm Audrey, and I am going to be giving a talk titled "Unraveling the Masculinization of Technology." I'm going to discuss gender, technology, and meaningful change. In the program, it says that we're going to learn about the gendered history of computing and explore how we can write a new narrative. That's only sort of true, but I'll explain.
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Hello, my pronouns are she and her. I publish a thing called "The Recompile," which is a feminist hacker journal. We also have a book called "The Responsible Communication Style Guide." Additionally, I am a Ruby programmer, and I would love to talk to you about my favorite Ruby project later.
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This talk was supposed to be an update of a talk I gave a couple of years ago at UltraConf. Back then, in 2016, I started off with the idea that we could observe that technology and programming are frequently considered to be male or masculine.
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There are many things that reinforce this perception for us, from job ads to speaker line-ups at conferences, company team pages, and so on. This has obvious effects; the gendering of technology allows men to find it easier to get interviews and jobs, be paid more, and be promoted more often.
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This also leads to men being able to invest in new companies, bringing more people like them into the industry. Once I've established that, I can show you that the field of computing was created by women in the 1940s and 1950s, and it still heavily depended on female labor through the 1960s.
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However, in the 1970s and 80s, the computing industry redefined itself to become more masculine. Some people benefited significantly from this change, while others just went along for the ride. To give you a visual example, we went from the original women who programmed the ENIAC and their work with cables, not just assistants or technicians, to seeing the two Steve's who founded Apple working on early ideas at the Homebrew Computer Club.
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How this change happened isn't simple; however, we have research that can explain how the industry developed between 1946 and 1978. As the computing industry grew, companies created hiring processes and cultures that made certain kinds of masculine identities the default. I'll have some references on this at the end.
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This cartoon is from an ACM conference paper. It states that programmers are often identified as being interested in puzzles, research applications, and risk-taking while disliking social interactions. This puzzle-loving, risk-taking persona of what makes a good programmer wasn't the only option even in the 1960s.
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This is illustrated in an article from a popular women's magazine where Dr. Grace Hopper explained that programming is akin to planning a dinner. As a staff scientist and systems programmer for UNIVAC, she helped develop the first